Thursday, April 12, 2012

Kirkland 12.04 LTS Released -- Hello World!

AUSTIN, Texas -- Kirkland Family Life Enterprises are thrilled to announce the timely release of the first product of its next generation -- Kirkland 12.04 Ultra LTS (code name: Camille).

Chief Architect and Lead Developer Kimberly Kirkland (code name: Mommy) delivered a perfect new child process at 9:35am on April 12th, 2012 -- impressively, three days ahead of schedule. As with most technical projects, the development team labored all the way through the night, having begun the release procedures with an all-night Sprint that kicked off around 7pm the previous evening.

Project Manager and Community Coordinator Dustin Kirkland (code name: Daddy) multitasked a stream of procurement and support requests, and helped ensure a smooth delivery. He tagged each milestones with numerous snapshots, offering encouragement throughout each work item. Kim and Dustin were bolstered by an expert pair of support engineers, Stephanie Carter (code name: Nanny) and Gerri Gros (code name: Mimi), who joined them on-site for the final QA and the initial release party. Dustin wore an Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" t-shirt for the duration of Sprint, with Kim noting that the Koala face made her smile any time the going got tough.

Camille 12.04 is an "Ultra" Long Term Support release, with first class expert support for at least 18 years (wow, take that, Ubuntu!). She is already showing tremendous input/output capabilities and impressive throughput performance on both ends. A contract technician confirmed that her dual-channel stereo input is in good working order, and that her analog output volume, while still a bit inarticulate and compressed, is quite audible. "I thought release day would never come," says Kimberly, exhausted but joyful. Kim sheds a tear, "We've been waiting to meet her for so long!"

Complete release notes do state that Camille is currently prone to frequent, spontaneous reboots and random periods of inactivity. Fortunately, her init and shutdown sequences are quite efficient. Kim and Dustin shared the design responsibilities for Camille's look and feel. They seem to have done quite an elegant job, having achieved a bit of unity around her outer shell. She has a simply gorgeous greeter! They are still getting used to the new user interface. And they're working their way through the various documentation and manuals whenever she enters one of her multiple sleep states.

"We've wanted this for so long, we're going to cherish every second of uptime!" says Dustin, while dealing with Camille's un-handled garbage collection on the system console. "We've actually decrypted and documented a few of her error codes."

Camille is currently in a limited-release mode, with access only granted to a few privileged associates. But in another 6 weeks or so, she's expected to make her first GA appearances, with a formal release party still to be held.

Asked if there's a 2.0 update in the works, Dustin, wearing his VP Product hat, shrugged and noted that they still have plenty of development to do on this one. "Let's work on maturing our 1.0 with a few stable release updates before we start talking about a whole new product line -- there's so many SRUs to process! We're not on a time-based release schedule, so just ask me again in a year or two."

Printfriendly

About the Author

Formerly the CTO of Gazzang, a venture funded start-up acquired by Cloudera, Dustin designed and implemented an innovative key management system for the cloud, called zTrustee, and delivered comprehensive security for cloud and big data platforms with eCryptfsand other encryption technologies.